Schnitzer Buys Business Parks South of Seattle for $59 Million

Schnitzer Properties has made a play for two industrial properties south of Seattle for $58.6 million.

The Portland-based investor led by Jordan Schnitzer paid $47.5 million for the four-building, 230,600-square-foot White River Corporate Park at 2002 West Valley Highway N, in Auburn, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported. The deal works out to $206 per square foot.

The company also bought the four-building, 48,000-square-foot Anderson Commerce Center at 8602 South 222nd Street in Kent for $11.1 million, or $231 per square foot.

The seller of both properties was an institutional fund managed by Boston-based TA Realty.

The purchases widened Schnitzer’s Seattle-area real estate footprint to 2.5 million square feet, with 594 tenants.

Schnitzer Properties, founded in 1950, has an office in Bellevue, where it focuses on industrial buildings that provide smaller spaces for local businesses, Schnitzer told the Business Journal.

The firm owns 33 million square feet across more than 190 properties in six western states, of which 84 percent is industrial, with the average tenant taking 9,000 square feet. In recent years, it has put more emphasis on the Seattle market.

“When I took over the company in 1990, I decided we should be a regionally driven, decentralized real estate investment company,” Schnitzer told the newspaper.

In addition to the Portland and Seattle markets, Schnitzer has properties in San Francisco, Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. It has seven industrial projects with 2.7 million square feet in the project pipeline, none of them around Seattle.

“We want more industrial space in the Seattle market,” Schnitzer said. “Building sites are hard to find so we were excited to find these sites for sale from a large pension fund adviser.”

The industrial vacancy in greater Seattle in the third quarter ending last month was 8.2 percent, according to JLL‘s third quarter market report. Typical asking rents have stayed flat at $1.10 per square foot.

— Dana Bartholomew